Here's a short quick set of questions.
Listen, I'm not here to run your life. What I came here to do was to ask those questions and get a response from you. I can't really tell you more than what you already know about those boxes you checked off.
I started to play with computers as a hobby. I'm sure a lot of you did and that's probably the passionate drive behind your talent. But at some point in my career, that fun got intermixed with a professional atmosphere and even then that passion was a huge advantage, because I could keep going even after other people gave up on a problem. But work is not play, particularly when play involves walking towards failures as a learning experience. Doing something hard is still joyful, but it's not something that's necessary in an enterprise workplace full of constant low-skill challenges, with-in a framework of burn down charts, delivery schedules for back-ported fixes, day to do day management and daily standups. And bit by bit, I have realized that what I do at work is never going to fill in for a hobby - it's work.
I want to feel the joy, of a purposefully hard problem solved, by sheer persistence, despite multiple dead-ends.
So, I wrote this list because I'm going through a period of self-reflection after failing to wrest back my hobby back from my profession.
If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious.
Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?
The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd.
But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.
-- Albert Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus"
posted at: 21:48 | path: /observations | permalink |